


Stakeheld

by Poetry



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Metaphors, Drunken Confessions, F/M, Harm to Animals, Marriage Proposal, Multi, Romance, Soul Selling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 02:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7022662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hardison saw it in Eliot first. He went after the security guards in the Pierson building with a smile on his face and a growl coming from a place deep in his chest that humans just didn’t have. </p><p>He began to suspect Parker, too, when he caught her gaze in the elevator and her eyes were brown, though he could have sworn they’d been pure black up on the roof.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stakeheld

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to @soleidan for suggesting the terminology and the title, and to @rembrandtswife for reading this over.
> 
> Feel free to play with this fantasy AU concept too, though I'd appreciate it if you'd link back to this fic.

**I.**

Hardison saw it in Eliot first. He went after the security guards in the Pierson building with a smile on his face and a growl coming from a place deep in his chest that humans just didn’t have.

He began to suspect Parker, too, when he caught her gaze in the elevator (after she got her clothes on) and her eyes were brown, though he could have sworn they’d been pure black up on the roof.

With Sophie he caught on when they met in his Chicago apartment and her laughter trilled like birdsong, and he had it confirmed by Anna Gunnstodt’s voice, which came out impossibly different from Sophie’s own.

Hardison started meeting people like them in the foster system, and he knew them when he saw them. Three of the people in his new crew were stakeheld.

  


**II.**

“So,” Nate said, looking up and down the table in Hardison’s fancy conference room. His eyes settled on Sophie. “A songbird’s got a stake in you.”

“I think you’ll find,” Sophie said, slow and amused, “that there are nearly four thousand species of songbird.”

“Hmm.” Nate narrowed his eyes at her, just a little, and thought, _I’ll figure it out eventually_ , knowing she would hear it in the lines of his face. He looked at Eliot next. “Wolf or coyote?”

Eliot folded his arms across his chest and said nothing.

Nate studied Parker, perched on the arm of her chair, eyes never still. “Something nocturnal and sneaky.”

Parker just smiled.

Hardison was listening with interest, but there was nothing feral in him. This was not a man who would trade ownership of his soul for power. Nate didn’t have that kind of integrity. He just couldn’t give away control of himself, not to anyone, much less the ghost of some poor dead thing. He said, “No stakeholder for your soul, eh, Hardison?”

“Do I look like I’ve ever been close to an animal that was dying?” Hardison spread out his hands. “No offense to all y’all, but that just ain’t hygienic.”

  


**III.**

Hardison booked the best hotel in Juan, Texas for their game on the judge. Not that that counted for anything, because there was a _rat_. In his _room._

He went next door to Eliot’s room and banged on the door. “Eliot! Eliot, you gotta save me!”

Eliot’s door flew open. He had just an undershirt and boxers on. His hair was wet from the shower and smelled like thyme or basil or something. “What is it?”

“There’s a rat in my room, man! It’s skittering all over the floor like that hand in The Addams Family. You gotta kill it!”

Eliot sighed, rolled his eyes, and picked up a heavy boot from the floor of his closet. He stepped out in the hallway with Hardison.

The door of Parker’s room exploded open. Her eyes were human-brown, but there was something wild in them. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Hardison can’t kill a stupid rat by himself, so I’m doing it for him,” Eliot said, hefting the boot.

“Don’t kill it!” Parker said shrilly. “Make it leave if you have to. But don’t kill it.”

Eliot let his arm fall, holding the boot low by his thigh. Hardison put it together. Parker crawled through air ducts without any claustrophobia or shortness of breath, and moved just as easily by night as by day. She hoarded cereal and shiny things. “Oh. Your stakeholder’s a rat.”

“He’s not a stakeholder,” Parker said. “That makes it sound like he’s one of those awful people in boardrooms we steal from. We just… share stuff.”

“Okay,” Hardison said. “We’ll trap it and take it outside.”

“You mean _I’ll_ trap it and take it outside,” Eliot growled, but it was more like the kind of growl a dog makes when it’s playing tug-of-war with a stick.

“Please?” Hardison said, and that was all it took. Eliot replaced the boot with a towel and caught the rat under it, transporting it safely outside. Parker watched it run into the bushes and waved goodbye.

Hardison never killed a rat again, after that. He watched videos on YouTube of people with their cute pet rats, and taught himself to like them.

  


**IV.**

Sterling, of course, knew that three of them were stakeheld. He wouldn’t have come for their operation in L.A. without knowing his targets.

“I’m going to leash your pets,” he told Nate, when he thought he had Parker, when he thought he had Eliot.

“I’m going to cage your little bird,” he said, when he thought he had Sophie.

“I don’t own them,” Nate replied. “They’re their own animals.”

  


**V.**

McRory’s was closed for the night, but Nate and Sophie were still at the darkened bar. She was finishing a story about the time her songbird’s ghost let her sound like the estranged five-year-old son of a rich divorcee, begging her over the phone to _please_ buy him a pony.

Nate could hear his words slurring as he said, “Why couldn’t I have given Sam a stake in my soul? I was there when he died.”

“Oh, Nate,” Sophie said, sliding his whiskey glass away from him. “A songbird’s ghost is such a small thing. He’s got a stake in my soul, yes, but only a little one. But a child? He’d ask for so much of your soul, there’d be barely any of you left.”

Nate shrugged. “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”

Sophie’s hand closed over his on the polished surface of the bar. “Maybe you think you’d be better off as some twisted shell of yourself, if it could keep some part of him here. But Sam wouldn’t see it that way, would he?”

She was right. Even if Nate could have made that offer, Sam would never have taken it. He wasn’t some dying animal, hungry for any life it was given. He’d loved his father, even when he didn’t deserve it.

  


  


**VI.**

After they took down Damien Moreau, Eliot went away for a while. Hardison didn’t like it, but he’d expected it. When he came back, Parker cornered him at the bar after hours and said, “How did you leave Moreau?”

Eliot froze with his beer halfway to his mouth. “What? Why do you want to know?”

“Because you figured out how to make yourself better,” Parker said. “I want to do that too.”

Hardison felt like maybe he should let the two of them talk this out in private. He started to get up, but Parker shot him a pleading look, and he stayed.

Eliot drank deeply from his beer and put it down. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But don’t interrupt.”

Parker and Hardison just leaned over the corner of the bar to listen.

“Moreau ordered me to… well. Never mind what I was there to do. But I had to finish the job by killing the dog on the property. She was a sheepdog mix, kinda off-white and shaggy. I shot her in the head.

“I could feel her ghost pawing at me, like a dog scratching at the door, asking to be let in. I knew what she wanted. I figured the least I could do for her was give her some little piece of my soul. So I let her have it. It wasn’t like she took a bite of me. More like she just took up room. And when she did, I saw myself the way she saw me.

“She didn’t see a bad man, or even a predator. I was a goddamn _natural disaster_ , like a plague or a hurricane. The deaths I caused didn’t even make me happy. I just made them happen, and I moved on.”

Eliot took another long drink. His eyes fell closed. “I served in the Army before I ever met Moreau. I was still able to sleep through the night, most nights. But ever since that dog took her stake in my soul, and showed me what sort of thing I’d become – I’ve never been able to sleep more than an hour or two at a stretch.”

Not a wolf. Not a coyote. Not the predator they’d all thought. Eliot sold a stake in his soul to a sheepdog. A sheepdog he’d shot in the head.

Hardison already knew Eliot had killed people, actual human beings, for Moreau. It shouldn’t be getting to Hardison like this, knowing that Eliot had killed a dog. But Hardison’s damn eyes wouldn’t stop burning.

His mouth started moving before he could stop it. “What did the rat take from you, Parker?”

He braced himself for something terrible. But Parker said, “Nothing.”

“There’s always a price,” Eliot said hoarsely. “Some piece of your soul that it takes.”

“I had nothing to pay,” Parker said. “There was a blizzard. We were hiding out in a bathroom in Central Park. I watched him die. When I let his ghost in, I asked him what he wanted.” Her eyes went black from lid to lid, like they did in dim light or darkness. “He said he just didn’t want me to die cold and hungry like he did.”

Hardison traded a look with Eliot. His eyes were burning again. “I wish I had a stakeholder,” he said suddenly. “Maybe I could help you out more. In ways I can’t help, the way I am.”

“I’m glad you don’t,” Eliot said. “Means you haven’t had to see death.”

“I’m glad too,” Parker said. “I wouldn’t want you to sell any part of you away. Not even to the best ghost ever.”

Hardison wanted to do something, say something, anything to show how grateful he was that they’d let him hear what he just heard. But he didn’t know how to do it in a way they would accept. It ended up taking him a year to figure it out.

In the apartment above the brewpub, he built a Parker-sized air duct system, all cushioned inside, filled with cleverly hidden stashes of food, water, and jewelry. It took Parker a whole week to find them all, and even afterward, she disappeared up there whenever the rest of the world was too much.

He made a big contribution to a local sheepdog rescue in the name of one of Eliot’s identities. The rescue was so grateful, they called him and asked him if he wanted to come meet the dogs. He came back to the brewpub smiling, his clothes flecked with dog hairs in every color.

  


**VII.**

When Nate opened the box, and showed the ring in the brewpub’s dim light, Sophie’s gasp had hidden inside it her songbird’s first joyful shout toward the dawn.

“Lara, mockingbird,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

When they left the brewpub, for the last time, she said, “So. How did you figure it out?”

Nate felt the cool humid air of the Portland night on his face and smiled. “I started learning bird songs. American and European only, since you haven’t spent much time elsewhere. When you’re not on the con, and you’re laughing, I can hear little flashes of song.”

Sophie laughed at that, bright and open. Nate heard a bluebird’s warble in it.

“I doubted myself at first,” Nate went on, “because I kept hearing so many different songs. I thought I must have been getting it wrong. But then I was sure I had it right. Your songbird had to be a mimic. Made sense, too, with what he lets you do. I kept listening, and there were so many different songs, the only bird that could sing them all would be a mockingbird.”

“Clever.” Sophie kissed him on the cheek. “But you do know Lara isn’t my real name, right?”

“Actually,” Nate said, “it is.”

Sophie’s mouth parted. Her eyes were very wide. Nate treasured the rare, unguarded openness of her face.

“I figured that out, too,” he said. “The mockingbird’s stake in your soul. I’m giving it back to you.”

Sophie’s expression turned inward, then outward again, letting a shadow of uncertainty show through. “He might just take it away from me again.”

“Then I’ll keep giving it back to you,” Nate said fiercely. He framed her neck in his hands and kissed her again and again. Between kisses, he said, “Lara. Lara. _Lara_.”

  


  


**VIII.**

When Nate and Sophie left the pub, Hardison’s heart felt full, a heavy and welcome weight in his chest. He sank into his chair and looked up at Parker and Eliot. He raised his hands to them, palms up. “Eliot, sheepdog,” he said, low. “Parker, rat. Will you…”

He couldn’t finish. This might be the most important thing he was ever going to say, and he couldn’t even say it.

Eliot took his raised hand, then reached for Parker’s. His face was open and bright, like a dog looking up at his best friend, full of the simple pleasure of being loved. “We change together. For better or worse.”

Parker took his other hand. Her eyes filled in with black. Hardison looked into them and wondered how he’d ever found them frightening. They were just another ferocious power of hers, like the strength in her thighs, the flash of her smile. “Til my dying day.”

He’d thought he was about to ask the most important question of his life, and it turned out he didn’t even need to ask it at all. Hardison beamed up at them, his guy and girl who shared their souls with friendly ghosts. How did life get to be so _good_?

Hardison had new questions for them. Even more important ones. He felt the smile going out of him, but not far; he wouldn’t have to reach, even a little, to get it back. He looked up at Eliot. “You said when you gave the sheepdog a stake in your soul, she showed you what you really looked like.” He kissed Eliot’s hand, just a brush of his lips against the knuckles, and found the smile again. “See anything different now?”

Eliot’s eyelids fluttered. If Hardison didn’t know him better, he’d say he was about to cry.

Hardison turned to Parker. “You said that the rat didn’t ask for anything from you, ‘cause you had nothing in your soul to give him.” He squeezed her hand, hard. “Got anything now?”

“No,” Parker said fiercely, squeezing him back. “There’s still nothing left for him. You two have the rest.”

Eliot wrapped his arm over Parker’s shoulders. “Yeah. Whatever’s left of my soul the dog didn’t take, you both have it.”

They were right. Hardison had given them both pieces of himself, and they’d given him more power than he’d ever seen a ghost give, even Moreau with his soul half-sold to a tiger he’d shot for himself. Eliot had taught him to fight, to believe in himself when he thought he might break down, and Parker had taught him to keep on breathing, and believe that someone would always come to save him.

The crew started with three of them, and it ended with three of them. Eliot, Parker, and Hardison were stakeheld.


End file.
